He calls before noon
on Saturday from San
Francisco where he’s
walking to the Farmer’s
Market to pick up quail
and look at the wines
being offered. It’s beautiful
in both our cities. I have
a mild hangover, and am
eating chicken salad
with huge purple grapes
mixed in. Life is the
equivalent of all
that is good. I take
a walk through my
city. An ambulance
sirens by, an old
woman stumbles and
falls. The purple
grapes seem too large
an idea
for my mouth, the
way truth feels when
you suddenly swallow
it whole.

The turtle man writes me about the dog, Lucy,
getting old and beginning to limp, and how his
friend, Wolfgang, in Germany, caught the train
to Paris for the ping-pong games. “Wouldn’t it
be nice,” turtle man says, “to be a train ride away
from Paris?” Then he spoke of Radar, the cat, who
recently got neutered and how he refuses
to look at any of the family, or allow them
near him. In answer I, the dog girl of summer,
write back and tell him how my barking
annoys the neighbors and how it used to be
when I thought about more than food or barking.
The BART goes underneath the bay
from Oakland to San Francisco. I lick water
from my bowl.

Ann Menebroker has published over twenty collections of poetry during a writing career which spans almost half a century. She has appeared in many anthologies in the U.S. and abroad, and has collaborated with artists and other poets on numerous projects in Sacramento, California. She continues to write and was in a documentary film in 2006, I Began To Speak, with other poets associated with the Sacramento poetry scene. The film is based on interviews and readings. Her latest book, Tiny Teeth: The Wormwood Review Poems, was published by R.L. Crow Press in 2004.